Over on the commercial networks, Seven won the 6pm news battle, and the overall ratings ladder, with 991,000 tuning in, according to OzTAM’s preliminary overnight metro ratings.

Nine News had 885,000 at the same time.

The most-watched entertainment program was Nine’s The Block, which had 928,000.

The Bachelor on Ten had 721,000, but topped the key advertising demographics of 16 to 39s and 18 to 49s. The 25 to 54 segment was taken out by The Block, with The Bachelor placing second.

Seven’s prime-time offering of Highway Patrol followed by Motorbike Cops was significantly behind its commercial rivals, with 394,000 metro viewers and 550,000 respectively.

Later in the evening, Ten’s new Australian drama Playing for Keeps had 465,000 metro viewers, down on its premiere audience of 583,000.

Thanks to the success of The Block, Nine’s primary channel won the evening with a 20.5% audience share. Its multi-channel 9Go also proved to be the most popular, with 4.3%, helping the Nine Network to an overall win of 29.0% of the audience.

Seven placed second with 17.9% and 26.4% for the network.

Ten had 13.9% on its primary channel and 20.9% on the whole network, while the ABC had 12.2% and 17.1%. SBS has a primary channel share of 4.3% and 6.6% for the network.

Paul Wallbank was news editor at Mumbrella between June 2017 and June 2019. Previously he's covered business and technology issues for outlets ranging from The Australian and Sydney Morning Herald to the ABC and Business Spectator.

Aside from the ABC tumult, it would be nice to see now and then in Mumbrella’s ratings summary the observation, in relation to 7 and 9’s 6pm News, that the figures are usually skewed by the oddities of the Perth market. 7’s huge News audience there greatly increases the national average while 9’s poor figure pulls down its average. The reality is that in the east of the country, 9 usually wins but the skewed averages obscure this.

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